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descriptive rather than poetical, as in the line from Browning,

Quick and sharp rang the rings down the net poles. This line of Browning's suggests that there is danger in the too facile use of the musical suggestibility of language. A strikingly insistent musical word or phrase becomes very tyrannical. It rings in the ears long after one would gladly forget it. Such a phrase is Lowell's "exhaustless grace of Niagara's emerald curve," a clever line that might be forgiven in verse but which cheapens the style of the prose passage in which it occurs. Ingenuity can do a great deal with the tones of speech in the way of musical description, but such devices, when they become too pat and apparent, seem like trifling with the serious purposes of language. Heard melodies in speech are sweet, but not when they are too insistently heard.

XXVIII

THE PLEA OF POETIC LICENSE

"THIS poeticall licence," says the Elizabethan Gascoigne, in his Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English, "is a shrewd fellow, and covereth many faults in a verse. It maketh wordes longer, shorter, of mo sillables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser, and to conclude, it turkeneth all things at pleasure.' The author of what may fairly be called the first modern English grammar, Bishop Lowth, who published his Short Introduction in 1767, is similarly impressed with the evil practices of the poets. They are, he says, "commonly the worst grammarians of the world." And in support of this sweeping charge, he brings forward many instances by way of proof, sparing none of the great names of his time.

No extended demonstration is needed to show that the language of poetry follows a different set of habits from that of prose. More or less consciously the poet places himself upon a different plane from the writer of prose, not only in the character of his thought, but also in the forms of its outer expression. Meter is one of the most obvious and most constant of the characteristics of poetical expression, but it is only one of many devices for giving verse its proper note of distinction. Archaic and newly coined words, new and strange compounds, departures from normal word-order and syntax, unusual stress, the shortening

or prolongation of syllables, all these licenses are used with varying degrees of freedom by different poets, but to some extent even by the most naturalistic of them. The native language of English poetry has, indeed, come to be one which, from the point of view of prose, is altogether unnatural and artificial.

In most instances this natural-artificial language of poetry does not raise the question of its relation to the language of prose. If we read poetry at all, we know what to expect, and consequently make allowances for the conventions of poetry as we do for the conventions of the stage when we go to the theater. We understand that the poet is writing that peculiar sort of English which the poets affect, and though we have no tendency to imitate him in our own daily use, we nevertheless permit him to play his game according to the rules which he has established for it. At least we usually permit him to do so. Sometimes, however, the discrepancy between natural prose use and poetical use is so striking as to thrust itself upon the reader's attention. The language of poetry often takes the language of prose and forcibly adapts it to its own purposes. Then there arises a conflict between the grammar of prose and the grammar of poetry, the chances of the victory of the latter being in direct proportion to the power of the poetic spell which it exerts over the reader. The inexperienced and the careless rimester are especially liable to fall into the error of satisfying conditions of meter by some outrageous sacrifice of the conventional rules of grammatical propriety. From the inexpert rimester the comic poet has learned to heighten the comic effect of his situation by the burlesque of grammar, as in "John Gilpin's Ride":

My sister and my sister's child,
Myself and children three,

Will fill the chaise; so you must ride
On horseback after we.

Thackeray's "Little Billee" gets a rime and a comic effect in the same way:

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
"I am extremely hungaree."

To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,
"We've nothing left, us must eat we."

These grammatical compromises for the sake of rime stand out in their full absurdity because the reader feels himself still in the regions of prose. His eyes are not blinded by any poetical glamor which might lead him to forgive violations of prose use for the sake of metrical regularity.

The blunders of the simple and the comic rimester, however, differ only in degree, not in kind, from those of the serious versifiers. Poets whose prose use is perfectly normal and regular are liable in verse to all sorts of grammatical improprieties and awkwardnesses, and this not because they think the license of verse gives them a dispensation from the rules of grammar, but because for the time being they forget their rules of grammar. They have their eyes fixed on the "higher law" of poetry, and lowly prose must correspondingly suffer. It was this weakness of the poets that provided Bishop Lowth with the main incentive to the composition of his pioneer treatise on grammar. He points out, for example, that the exigency of meter "hath led Mr. Pope into a great impropriety in the beginning of his 'Messiah':

"O Thou my voice inspire

Who touch'd Isaiah's hallow'd lips with fire!

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The solemnity of the style would not admit of You for Thou in the pronoun; nor the measure of the verse touched'st or did'st touch, in the verb, as it indispensably ought to be in the one or the other of these two forms: You, who touched, or Thou, who touched'st or did'st touch. The bishop has certainly found a crevice in the poet's armor. For Pope could not, and would not, have defended his grammar except on the ground of poet's privilege—an argument of last resort. Other examples cited in the Short Introduction show a cheerful disregard of the tense forms of the verb, as in Gay's lines:

Sure some disaster has befell:

Speak, Nurse, I hope the boy is well.

Or, as in this, from Roscommon's "Essay":

For rhyme in Greece and Rome was never known
Till by barbarian deluges o'erflown.

In one of Robert Greene's sonnets occurs a rime which not even the most reckless versifier today would risk:

In Cypress sat fair Venus by a fount,

Wanton Adonis toying on her knee:

She kissed the wag, her darling of account;

The boy 'gan blush, which when his lover see,

She smiled, and told him love might challenge debt,

And he was young and might be wanton yet.

The cases of pronouns are also treated in a high-handed way, as in these lines from Prior:

Forever in this humble cell

Let Thee and I, my fair one, dwell;

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